Intel's Next-Generation Itanium "Poulson": 8 Cores, 50MB Cache
 

Intel Corp. will disclose peculiarities of its next-generation Itanium processor code-named Poulson for mission-critical applications at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February, 2011. The new chip will double the amount of IA64 cores as well as the amount of cache, but will maintain compatibility with the current Itanium 9300-series platform.

Based on the brief agenda of the ISSCC conference, at 32nm eight-core Itanium processor, which is most likely to be Poulson as Intel skips 45nm node for its central processing units (CPU) aimed at mission-critical applications, will contain 3.1 billion transistors and will measure by 18.2*29.9mm, which equals to 545.8mm2 die size. Given that Intel knows exact size of the forthcoming microprocessor, it is highly likely that the company either already has working samples of the chip or at least its digital "floor plan".

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...onference.html